By Elizabeth Wulfhorst
In addition to a shopping list, customers will soon need to remember to bring their own bags to the store.
Last week New Jersey passed a bill that prohibits single-use plastic carryout bags, single-use paper carryout bags and polystyrene foam food service products. It also limits the use of single-use plastic straws. Many towns along the Jersey Shore have already enacted similar measures through municipal ordinances, but this statewide ban now only needs Gov. Phil Murphy’s signature to become law. The legislation, the strongest in the country to help reduce single-use plastic, passed in the state Assembly and the Senate quickly Sept. 24. Murphy has 45 days to sign the bill into law.
“Now, we can all look forward to picking up less trash on our beaches and during Clean Ocean Action’s bi-annual Beach Sweeps,” said Cindy Zipf, executive director of the Long Branch-based environmental organization that has been working tirelessly to educate the public about the dangers of plastic. “There will be less plastics in the ocean to cause harm and death to marine life,” she said.
For 35 years Clean Ocean Action (COA) has been running a beach cleanup program in the spring and fall with volunteers collecting debris along the New Jersey shoreline. They have been cataloging their finds and bringing to light the impact these types of products have on the environment.
“It’s almost a dream come true, even though it’s taken this long, to have a policy that will change the results of our beach cleanups, hopefully, in the future,” said Kari Martin, advocacy campaign manager for COA. The organization has been working for “at least the last three years” to get the bill “over the finish line,” explained Peter Blair, COA policy attorney. “So we’re extremely excited that it’s finally passed both houses and is awaiting governor signature.”
Even once Murphy signs the bill, which Martin said she hopes will happen soon, noting that the COVID-19 pandemic is obviously a pressing matter taking up a lot of the governor’s time at the moment, the provisions of the law don’t go into effect immediately. The hope is that businesses and consumers pivot quickly away from single-use plastics, even though the law will give them up to two years in some cases to do so.
“We’re optimistic that people will be early implementers,” said Blair. “And when there’s a deadline looming, we know that there’s always going to be people who are proactive.”
COA will also be educating people about what they can do to make these changes easier and quicker. “We plan to use the information we’ve collected for our beach sweeps to show why we needed this law and why it’s important that we make these small changes in our everyday life,” Martin said.
Those changes will mostly apply to grocery stores and the food service industry. The law considers a “carry-out bag” to mean any “bag that is provided by a store or food service business to a customer for the purpose of transporting groceries, prepared foods, or retail goods.” There are some exemptions under the bill, including bags used to wrap uncooked meat, fish, or poultry, plastic produce bags, dry cleaning bags and more. Certain polystyrene products are also exempt. Once the law takes effect, violators will be warned first and then fined in increasing amounts for multiple infractions.
According to the bill, global annual production of plastics has increased to over 381 million tons and that approximately one-third of all plastics produced are single-use plastics. In the United States, it is estimated that 100 billion single-use plastic carryout bags and 25 billion Styrofoam coffee cups are thrown away each year. In addition to the production and use of plastic, another factor that led to the bill’s passage is that a very small percentage of plastic is ever recycled. Most single-use plastics end up in landfills or become litter in waterways and oceans. These plastics do not biodegrade, but instead break down into microplastics, which are eaten by fish and other marine life, thus entering the food chain and ending up being consumed by humans. A 2019 study in the journal “Environmental Science and Technology” concluded humans could be consuming up to 70,000 microplastic particles a year.
The bill states that “approximately eight million tons of plastic end up in the oceans annually; that, without action, scientists estimate that by 2050 the mass of plastic pollution in the ocean will exceed the mass of fish.”
Single-use plastic waste doesn’t just create “visual pollution,” the state Legislature found, it also impacts major portions of the New Jersey economy, notably tourism, fishing and shipping.
“It’s not really that drastic (a change). I mean, many of us have those reusable bags piling up in our cars or in our houses,” she said. “People need to change their behavior and remember their bags.” She also noted that the bill provides potential alternatives to plastic like hemp, an easily biodegradable raw material that can be used in environmentally friendly packaging.
“There’s technology, you know, coming around daily in terms of coming up with new alternatives. But we have alternatives available now for us and we have the know-how to be able to change our behavior.”
This article originally appeared in the Oct. 8 – 14, 2020 edition of The Two River Times.
